Why do you think that “Center for Modern Rationality” is going to make things worse? Let’s hope it will not hinge on Eliezer Yudkowsky’s more controversial deliberations (as for me, his thoughts on: the complexity of ethical value, the nature of personhood, the solution to FAI).
I don’t think what they teach will be particularly harmful to people’s epistemic habits, but I don’t think it’ll be helpful either, and I think that there will be large selection effects for people who will, through sheer osmosis and association with the existent rationalist community, decide that it is “rational” to donate a lot of money to the Singularity Institute or work on decision theory. It seems that the Center for Modern Rationality aims to create a whole bunch of people at roughly the average LessWrong commenter level of prudence. LessWrong is pretty good relatively speaking, but I don’t think their standards are nearly high enough to tackle serious problems in moral philosophy and so on that it might be necessary to solve in order to have any good basis for one’s actions. I am disturbed by the prospect of an increasingly large cadre of people who are very gung-ho about “getting things done” despite not having a deep understanding of why those things might or might not be good things to do.
Why do you think that “Center for Modern Rationality” is going to make things worse? Let’s hope it will not hinge on Eliezer Yudkowsky’s more controversial deliberations (as for me, his thoughts on: the complexity of ethical value, the nature of personhood, the solution to FAI).
I don’t think what they teach will be particularly harmful to people’s epistemic habits, but I don’t think it’ll be helpful either, and I think that there will be large selection effects for people who will, through sheer osmosis and association with the existent rationalist community, decide that it is “rational” to donate a lot of money to the Singularity Institute or work on decision theory. It seems that the Center for Modern Rationality aims to create a whole bunch of people at roughly the average LessWrong commenter level of prudence. LessWrong is pretty good relatively speaking, but I don’t think their standards are nearly high enough to tackle serious problems in moral philosophy and so on that it might be necessary to solve in order to have any good basis for one’s actions. I am disturbed by the prospect of an increasingly large cadre of people who are very gung-ho about “getting things done” despite not having a deep understanding of why those things might or might not be good things to do.